SMOKE SIGNALS

I know that last week I promised to write about making tangible
change for Loyola, and that idea - that uber-Jesuitical philosophy -
isn't going anywhere. But when we decided to devote this edition to
drug use, to the myths and misconceptions and the limitations of
personal freedom that our public discourse on the subject upholds, I
decided to give the question my full attention. As we say in our
staff editorial, we're not advocating any kind of substance abuse,
but we're not caught up in moralizing a complex, infinitely faceted
issue either. We're making reasonable suggestions - in this case, the
legalization and regulation of a soft drug - which are as applicable
at Loyola as anywhere.

This is an institution that's considering (you must've seen the
signs) creating a tent - a cage, let's say - for cigarette smokers,
that requires incoming freshmen to take an online quiz on the evils
of alcohol before registering for classes and that litters our
inboxes with e-mails reminding us, "Don't drink too much this
Halloween" or, as a recent poster reads, "reen puke isn't pretty."

It's good advice, knowing your limits and making informed decisions
(and, obviously, no puke is pretty); but informing your decisions
means considering real information, employing the ability to approach
the problem of substance abuse from its cultural foundations. We've
written before about the stanky, shining-city ethos of simplistic,
puritanical Americana and the double standards by which our
politicians, clerics and public figures live, in illicit sexual
activity (any red-blooded Republican senator will tell you that gay
people are totally worse than heroin), in avarice and, sure, in drug
use - a scene again and again painted in wide swaths of mascara and
resin, washed over with a few douses of Old Fitz and hung in the
Capitol above Dick Cheney's grizzly, salted frame:

You can gargle your Xanax tablets with a liter of coffee and a
fistful of Excedrin, and while you're at it, you can score some
Ritalin for your raunchy, deviant step kids. Then you can run for
congress, and win - you're an American, swimming in drugs and
bitching about some harmless dude smoking a fatty and watching Planet
Earth. Priests walk by swinging big buckets of incense, leering at
their fans while John Medeski rox out on that huge organ and Robert
Lowell drives headfirst into the void ("If we see light at the end of
the tunnel / it's the light of the oncoming train"). Spooky stuff.

And this is one of the points I've been stressing for so long. It's
more than a double standard, more than the fact that, say, offenses
for white-collar drugs such as cocaine incur a fraction of their
inner-city cousins' minimum jail time (5 grams of crack for 500 grams
of the pure, powdered version). And it's more, too, than the fact
that many of our most stodgy, conservative figures have
long-standing, and very dangerous, addictions to prescription painkillers.

It's that we're a people inundated with foggy, distorted illusions
about virtue and morality and the future of those cracked out step
kids, about the divinity of the white working man, and, most
importantly, about the most egregious evils - atheism, gay marriage,
liquor you buy by the can, cable television, illegal immigration.
Whatever. Abortion, too. But how much is said - aside from in your
equally foggy Anthro courses (if you get mah drift) - about the
perilous course of systematized violence and structured poverty that
bogs so many down, and, drawing your attention aside with the aid of
a few sultry D.A.R.E. officers, repeats itself infinitely?

We're addicted to denial, and - check it out - it's like completely free.

But we should be past this, and we can be. We've got to start
listening to new, alternative voices, to people who can qualify their
passion with the ability to reason and experiment, to think for
themselves but with others in mind. Now THAT's "using your ethics
more than your Blackberry."

And that, alone, is a good enough reason to think before you write me
a letter. Unless you're too stoned to write one.